PHP

Hopefully this blog entry will help a few people overcome some of the hurdles in setting up a donations system. We are a drupal shop so all the following is for drupal 6.

Recently, while working at requirements for a Government client I was tasked with finding a way to create rss feeds for site wide searches. Here, I've decided to share this solution with the wider community.

Recently we built an event registration and online payment tool using Ubercart and the Webform module, based on Drupal 6. There are a number of options when in comes to Drupal-based event registration - the one we've used before is CiviCRM's CiviEvent. Of course, in this and most cases, the CiviCRM suite is overkill and adds far to much complexity when CRM functionality is not required.

Ubercart is definitely the module of choice when it comes to accepting online payment through your own site. However, at the moment, the de facto Ubercart method for doing online event registration is with a module called UC Node Checkout. It's perfect for a one-and-done event registration site, but for a site that is hosting several events simultaneously and on an ongoing basis, it's awkward. This is due to the fact that it maps a content type to a product SKU - so for each event you'd need to create a new content type. Not really very good long-term, particularly when the site administrator is not overly familiar with Drupal or Ubercart.

OK, so the Connect module has actually been around for a while now, but the first version was painfully difficult to use, and the second version has only just seen an official, albeit beta, release.

Connect arose because we wanted to create a flexible and extensible online campaign platform for Drupal. The goal was to produce a framework that would allow different features to be added as necessary. Thus, a single tool could be used to create a simple petition or a sophisticated online email- or fax-sending campaign.

We had to bring down this service due to abuse.